The publicist warns that you have only 10 or 15 minutes tops with Hoffman, who, at 75, has just directed his first feature. But it’s 10 or 15 action-packed, free-associative minutes not to be missed.

Hoffman is in Toronto, showing off “Quartet,” a charmer of a comedy with Tom Courtenay, Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins as four friends in a stately retirement home in the English countryside. They are, or were, rather celebrated opera singers, and now they are together again, carrying old memories and old wounds up the grand stairs of Beecham House, and also forgetting important meetings (Collins’ character) and having to pee a lot (Connolly’s). The film opens Friday.

He declares that he was already directing in his head, and aloud, when he was 19, in his first acting classes. “I intuitively started to direct,” he explains. “And I would help friends out and I had a feel for it — they said, ‘Hey, you could be the next Kazan.’ … He was the big director then.”

Hoffman, of course, did not go on to be the next Elia Kazan. He went on to be Dustin Hoffman, and he has the Academy Awards and the recent Kennedy Center Honor to prove it.

Looking back at rich experiences is a theme in “Quartet” — but also having rich experiences in the here and now. Hoffman cast his film with real-life musicians from the worlds of opera, classical music and jazz. Most of the roles, apart from the biggies, belong to these folks.

Before leaving, he did share his philosophy about filmmaking, and maybe about life:

“All you’re trying to do is each day look back and be able to say, ‘I couldn’t have tried harder.’

“When you wake up in the morning: ‘Could I have tried harder?’ And if you say, ‘Yeah, well I kind of (bleeped) off that day,’ well, that I’ve never done.”

And he credits that work ethic to Mike Nichols, the director who gave Hoffman his first big break — the role of Benjamin Braddock in a little 1967 thing called “The Graduate.”

“He took me aside one day on the set, I was very tired, I was 29 years old, and he said, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I stayed up late.’

“And he looked at me very closely — Mike was only about 35 — and he says, ‘You’re never going to get another chance to do this scene. And it’s going to be up there for your life, at least.’ He didn’t know it was going to turn out the way it did, ‘The Graduate.’ But I’ve never forgotten that. This is your chance to do this. You’ll never be able to do this again.”